PODCAST

The Lindahl Letter

Dr. Nels Lindahl

Thoughts about technology (AI/ML) in newsletter form every Friday www.nelsx.com

technology management

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4:59

Bulk imagine improvement

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/07/28

We are not to the point where some AI agent is going to be able to do this type of bulk image improvement by a verbal command. I really wanted to be able to just say, “ok computer, edit the photos in this folder to improve them and ping me when you are done.” This use case will probably show up at some point, but now is not that point in the timeline. The future of this type of computer usage is close, but not here just yet.Over the last couple of weeks, I have spent some time messing around with

4:09

Build captain fractal using Colab

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/07/21

We are getting closer and closer to the world envisioned in Star Trek and countless other science fiction universes where you could just ask the computer to complete some sort of task or build for you. We are starting to see what would be like an AutoGPT or a plugin style version of ChatGPT with agents that work to complete some sort of request. It’s not like they have a full built in chron system with scheduling and routines. Really actionable virtual assistants are going to show up here very

4:57

How do you use Colab in a generative way?

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/07/14

Working out of notebooks is an easy and lightweight way to just mess around with code. One of my all time favorite ways to go about doing that is in the Colab research space provided by the team over at Google [1]. They have an offering for a pro subscription, but you can get in and use things without a payment plan. Sure the promise of faster GPUs, more memory, and longer runtimes is enticing. If you really get deeply into the process of training models, then it might make sense for you to make

5:41

Democratizing AI system security

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/07/07

The topic for this week was a weighty one for sure. It’s one that I think will functionally happen, but I do not believe will be real in terms of actual practice. We are seeing a lot of emphasis on using these new AI systems that are popping up everywhere. People are not able to build these systems from scratch anymore. Using code from somebody else is becoming more and more a part of the process. When you look at how to democratize AI systems it is certainly about spreading usage and making these

3:36

Profiling Google DeepMind

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/06/30

Things have been happening with Google DeepMind. A lot of news has been dropping since I started crafting this post. I don’t want to write about the news of the moment on this one. The context and analysis within this post is going to try to be deeper than a base reaction to that recent news. The Verge (and a ton of other people) reported that, “Google’s big AI push will combine Brain and DeepMind into one team” [1]. Apparently, some drama exists around those two organizations being combined. We

4:44

Profiling Hugging Face

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/06/23

Something is going to have to give here pretty soon for Hugging Face or they are going to get left behind by the extended model, plugin driven, and now internet connected GPT models that some of the biggest platforms are working to take mainstream. We are seeing the real time development creating extensibility into actions from companies like OpenAI and their partner Microsoft that are going to be a foundational groundwork for how connectivity works within these models. This ecosystem is going to be

6:13

Profiling OpenAI

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/06/16

Security professionals the world over are concerned about what people like some of Samsung’s engineers might be doing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT services [1]. Let’s back up just a bit from that very real breaking news security reality and make sure to set the stage. Instead of starting with a complete corporate history about OpenAI, you knew that I would go out and search Google Scholar to find some of the key OpenAI related scholarly works [2]. Alternatively, you could surf over to the OpenAI website

6:02

Pivoting to AI + Security

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/06/09

It's all happening. I'm pivoting to AI + Security as the central topic for The Lindahl Letter. The next weekly modules I'm going to create are all going to be pivoting to a clear security based focus each week. Content for this year of The Lindahl Letter was packaged into posts encompassing weeks 105 to 156 or 52 total blocks of content. Think year divisible by week with production spread evenly. This is the 3rd year of that type of writing effort. This is week 124 in that sequence and I have yelled

3:54

We are wholesale oversubscribed on AI related content

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/06/02

Substack Week 123: We are wholesale oversubscribed on AI related contentThank you for tuning in to this audio only podcast presentation. This is week 123 of The Lindahl Letter publication. A new edition arrives every Friday. This week the topic under consideration for The Lindahl Letter is, “We are wholesale oversubscribed on AI related content.”You may have noticed that the topic for the post this week changed. I called an audible and wrote a different piece of content.All that AI content has hit a

4:10

AIaaS: Will AI be a platform or a service? Auto-GPT...

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/05/26

I spent some time over the last couple of weeks looking for scholarly articles that reference AI as a service (AIaaS) [1]. Then I realized that things are changing so quickly in the landscape of AI these days that none of those articles even consider Auto-GPT [2]. Unless you have been on vacation and hiding from AI news recently you have been hearing about the advent of this plugin, multiagent, and task targeted implementation of a GPT model called Auto-GPT. People are using it to do things. You can

5:10

Considering an independent study applied AI syllabus

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/05/19

My initial take on writing an independent study based syllabus for applied AI was to find the best collection of freely available scholarly papers that somebody could read as an onramp to beginning to understand the field. That I think is a solid approach to helping somebody get going within a space that is very complex and full of content. It’s a space that is perpetually adding more content than any one person could possibly read or consume. Before you take that approach it is important to

6:31

That one with an obligatory AI trend’s post

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/05/12

Right now at the start of 2023, I would probably highlight 3 AI trends: generative models, automation, and legislation. Before we get into those specific topics let’s zoom out for just a second and look at two different reports you could read to get a sense of what is going on right now. One of the great places to start would be with the recently released 2023 AI Index report from the Institute for Human Centered AI. Nestor Maslej, Loredana Fattorini, Erik Brynjolfsson, John Etchemendy, Katrina

5:17

All that bad data abounds

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/05/05

Flooding and astroturfing abound at the moment. Both of those things were happening before the advent of large language models (LLMs), but they have increased in frequency now that bad actors are able to just open the floodgates for content. Making large swaths of the internet that is just designed for search engine placement and self-referencial boosting has become so much easier recently. Sure all that bad data was abounding before this shift in what is now happening with OpenAI, Google,

18:58

A paper on political debt as a concept vs. technical...

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/04/28

This is going to be an interesting edition of The Lindahl Letter. Please pardon the self-indulgence of working with ChatGPT to write a paper and ultimately expand that into a full book using prompts and the model. Sit back and relax as this will be a long one.I was able to give OpenAI’s ChatGPT a prompt of, “A paper on political debt as a concept vs. technical debt.” That created the following output:Political debt and technical debt are two distinct concepts that have different implications and

4:59

A literature study of non-mail polling methodology

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/04/21

This week I ended up trying to find some solid academic articles to read. This time around I found a few that have publicly available downloads to share. Digging around literature related to non-mail polling methods opens the door to a lot of different directions. You will get a sense from the journals listed below that a lot of literature exists and research is benign conducted about public opinion. My interests are more in the automated methods that would help collect sentiment to complete polling

6:28

A literature study of mail polling methodology

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/04/14

Searching around on Google Scholar is something that I’m pretty adept at by now. This happens to be the 116th Substack post and almost all of them have involved some type of research. Trying to get a set of the best articles on mail polling methodology was actually really challenging [1]. I know that modern polling has moved away from mail polling in general. It’s expensive. The response rate has gotten worse over time. Probably the worst part about it is that compared to phone or internet based

11:18

A literature review of modern polling methodology

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/04/07

Earlier today I did end up getting ChatGPT Plus for a cost of USD $20 a month. That apparently will provide me better availability during high demand, faster response speeds, and priority access to new features [1]. I’m not sure if this subscription will be worth keeping. I’m about to open up the latest model GPT-4 and see what it is able to accomplish in terms of advanced reasoning, complex instructions, and more creativity. I have spent the last 6 weeks thinking about writing these polling related

6:54

How does confidential computing work?

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/03/31

Imagine you move part of your workload to an environment that you don’t fully own. That used to be a datacenter and more recently it is probably a cloud environment. Sooner or later you might think about how to secure that environment in terms of hardware-based security or other ways to secure things. Most of the promotional pages on the internet covering this one try to bring forward the idea of securing code and data [1]. Seriously, the idea of confidential computing is everywhere on these cloud

26:00

Structuring an introduction to AI ethics

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/03/24

You may remember that I listened to an audiobook during a road trip back to Kansas about AI. Kissinger, H. A., Schmidt, E., & Huttenlocher, D. (2021). The age of AI: and our human future. Hachette UK. Former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt has had a lot to say about the future of AI and a lot of that has been grounded in the implications of AI on society. It’s important to set the foundation of any introduction to AI ethics on the implications to people and society. Crowdsourcing a really solid

3:04

Autonomous vehicles

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/03/17

Lectures related to this topic are mostly about convolutional neural networks and visual recognition systems. My searches were explicitly for autonomous vehicles and did not directly include any of the methods being deployed. That in part was due to my interest in going into higher levels of analysis this time around. My searches of Google Scholar on this topic of autonomous vehicles returned results with a lot fewer citations than I was expecting to find [1]. Three of the papers in the first 30

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